November 18, 2011
Some new Salesforce news this week! Salesforce.com has made another acquisition, this time it is fellow Chicago native, Model Metrics. “With Model Metrics, salesforce.com will add mobile and social expertise, allowing the company to further transform customers and empower its global partner ecosystem.” Not too many details about the acquisition have been disclosed; however, we do know the acquisition should come to a close by the end of January 2012.
Appirio offers some great insight into salesforce.com’s newest acquisition. First and foremost, it highlights how important the cloud and the social enterprise are to enterprises. With Model Metrics, “Salesforce will be able to make the social enterprise vision tangible for customers.” Secondly, it will grab new customers who are hesitant towards the social enterprise and allow them to “see their future” as they adopt the social enterprise. Lastly, Appirio brings up the valid point that this acquisition removes “one of the leading service competitors from the ecosystem,” and possibly opening up new opportunities for other Salesforce partners.
Cloud Tweaks offers a fun list of new ways to use cloud computing. Need to get your dog licensed in Europe? Take it to the cloud. Want to compare chocolate chip cookies in New York? Serious Eats can do that for you. Want to play Mahjong in your free time? Well, there’s a cloud app for that, too.
Infrastructure professionals will soon need to wake up and smell the cloud. It is important now than ever before to embrace the cloud and adapt to this new model; the cloud is efficient, fast, and cost effective, and cutting down on costs will help with the growth of any company. There are various cloud alternatives for companies to take advantage of, and infrastructure professionals and IT need to begin looking into them.
One neat little aspect of Salesforce’s Winter ’12 release is Social Contacts. Basically, when you enable Social Contacts, you will have social media buttons at the top of every contact’s page. Salesforce searches for that name in Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, so you can see their social media pages without having to leave salesforce.com. The issue, however, is that not everyone in Twitter uses their name as their Twitter handle, and not everyone has public search enabled on their Facebook pages. As a fix, make sure you check out your privacy settings on Facebook (the post tells you how to do so) to make sure you are searchable and findable. For that Twitter fix, well, there really isn’t one, so you’ll just have to manually search for your contact’s Twitter pages (but don’t worry, Salesforce allows you to do this within salesforce.com, too).
